John D. Norton
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Center for Philosophy of Science
University of Pittsburghhomepage

Causation as Folk Science

Causal talk and causal notion permeate our discussions both inside and
outside science. Most us feel that we have not really understood a phenomenon
until we have a grasp of the causal processes that underlie it. Is this
pervasive use of causal talk merely a convenient language through which we
can readily picture the processes of the natural world? Or does it derive
from a deeper fact about nature that is antecedent to all science? That
deeper fact I call "causal fundamentalism." It presupposes that the world is
governed by a factual principle of cause and effect and that the burden of
the individual sciences is to find its expression in their particular
domain.

I will describe a form of skepticism about causation that denies this
doctrine of causal fundamentalism. It will be defended by general arguments
and also through an examination of the causal principles that form part of
the foundations of many physical theories.

Einstein's Methods and His Discovery of General Relativity

No one in science, not even an Einstein, makes worthy discoveries without
undertaking a systematic investigation. What sorts of conceptions governed
the systematic part of Einstein's investigations? I will outline one notion
that played an important role in Einstein's discovery of general relativity.
It is Einstein's distinction between thinking physically and thinking
formally. I will illustrate how Einstein consciously shifted back and forth
between these two modes of thinking in the years leading up to his discovery
of general relativity. We will see some pages from Einstein's "Zurich
Notebook" which contains Einstein's scratch pad calculations at the decisive
period of his discovery of general relativity.

That Damn Dome: Indeterminism in Classical Physics

It has been known for a long time that classical Newtonian physics admits
indeterministic systems. They are systems whose present state does not fix
their future. These long-known failures of indeterminism, however, have
involved exotic systems, such as "space invaders" that rush in from spatial
infinity at arbitrarily high velocities; or "supertask systems" in which an
infinite collection of masses at rest spontaneously sets itself into
motion.

One might convince oneself that these systems can be ignored because they
are too exotic to take seriously. That attitude is harder to maintain for the
case of the dome. In it, a mass sits at the top of a dome with a specified
shape, over which it can slide freely. Newton's laws permit the mass to stay
there indefinitely; and, as two lines of calculus show, also permit the mass
spontaneously to move at any time and in any direction.

The dome is interesting not just since it displays an interesting sense in
which Newtonian physics is indeterministic. It also raises a series of
broader questions: Just what is Newtonian physics? Just which idealization
are permitted? What does it mean to say a system is "physical"? This last
notion proves to be a notion of possibility peculiar to physics that has
slipped under the modal philosopher's radar.